Nordstorm
Streamlining digital asset media management
Overview
Nordstrom is a Fortune 500 luxury department store chain that offers an expansive selection of products.
The Challenge
The team receives and catalogs thousands of images every day manually from their media content creators (e.g. photographers and videographers).
With great offerings, comes a great collection of assets. Nordstrom came to Hero Digital for help with creating a centralized portal to streamline media asset transfers for their vendors (e.g. photographers), using out-of-box components existing on their current platform in Adobe Experience Manager.
DELIVERABLES
Platform Audit
Interviews
User Flows
Concepts
Wireframes
Prototypes
Responsive Web Design
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
1
Research
We spent two weeks uncovering user and business needs by conducting stakeholder interviews and platform audits of Adobe Experience Manager. We then defined key tenets to drive the design direction of the product.
Discover & Empathize
Stakeholder Interviews
After analyzing the brief and refining questions — I conducted a series of stakeholder interviews. This aimed to better understand user pain points, clarify assumptions, and learn the specifics around uploading assets and file requirements.
Platform Audit
To gain insights and understand what was feasible within the AEM platform in terms of functionality and interface design, I held working sessions with our in-house engineering team.
Design Tenets
Clear information architecture
Lay out a structured page architecture to provide users with orientation of where they are in the flow and what to expect next.
Timely feedback
Provide users with feedback—such as tooltips, error states, and confirmation alerts—where they may get stuck along their journey.
Step-by-step advancement
Encourage users to progress forward by presenting an organized information hierarchy in forms, guided navigation, and call-to-action.
Streamline Workflows
Improve and expedite workflows for users uploading batch images showing the value of their time.
2
Approach
We spent three weeks analyzing the user’s journey in uploading assets and formulating the critical functionalities for the MVP, by outlining key user tasks, user flow, and wireframes.
User Flow
User Tasks
Wireframes
Asset upload
The most critical user goal was to be able to quickly take action towards uploading digital assets.
Upon logging in, users would be presented with a split-screen work area, a familiar pattern in file management platforms.
Feedback states
No one ever wants to hit a dead end. In order to ensure the users’ confidence in the product experience, it’s critical that we prompt them with relevant information and the right time.
Error states throughout the upload process. A bold confirmation alert will be presented to the user to indicate their upload success.
Error states
Success state
Forms + Selector
It was vital to keep the assets organized for both the vendors and Nordstrom end-users.
To ensure accurate and complete metadata entry, we designed clear forms and date selectors with text style hierarchy, logical order, and shortcuts.
3
Execution
We spent four weeks creating mockups to ensure that the visual language helped guide the user along the various flows of the product by using bold colors for alerts, grayscale for text hierarchy, and familiar iconography.
Concept + Ideation
Outcomes
We successfully shipped the MVP, replacing Nordstrom’s previous ad-hoc email system for uploading assets. The new centralized portal enabled vendors and end-users within Nordstrom to transfer, organize, and track assets.
Building the product on AEM with out-of-box components allowed for speed and scalability. In the future, the adaptable MVP could be enhanced to offer additional services to Nordstrom and its vendors.